When using the Our Hometown system with Newsletters, make sure you choose a theme that let’s you choose the content type to include. Our Hometown uses “articles”, instead of posts, to better address the needs of newspapers and other publications, that require subheadings, bylines, and edition dates.
When sending a newsletter, you’ll want to select “articles” as the content type, and possibly “PDF” if you want to include your e-edition as well.
A theme is something that make graphically pleasant your message and can enrich it with some extra content or even create the whole content for you (which you can just slightly modify).
On creating a new message, you select a theme: there is a blank theme which gives you a blank sheet where to compose and other themes which prefill the message with latest post from your blog.
A theme can have some configurations, like messages, colors and so on. When you change the theme its configuration appears and you can tweak the setting to see how your message will be.
Since theme settings can be complex, they will be saved and reloaded when you will compose a new message with that theme.
A theme produces two messages: one in html format, with color, fonts and images and one in pure text. Almost every email client, today, is able to show html emails, but a textual version even minimal, is useful to reduce the spam issues.
It’s not possible to produce a textual version directly from the html one, so you should write it by hand or use the content generated by a theme.
To test the theme generated email, you can send a test sample to all “test” subscribers (a test subscriber is a regular subscriber with the test flag on – see the subscriber management panel).
After you finished to configure the theme, you can select the “compose” button: a real email message is generated and you’ll enter the editing panel.
Themes cannot be changed once the email is generated: if you change your mind, you should delete the email and create a new one.
